What makes a photo book still worth opening in ten years

What separates the photo books people keep from the ones they don't?

Go to almost any family home and you'll find two kinds of photo book. One gets picked up whenever someone visits. The other has been on the same shelf, unopened, since the year it was made.

The difference is almost never photographic quality. Some of the most-loved family books are full of badly lit, slightly blurry pictures taken on old phones. Three other things decide it.

Why do photo books with words in them last longer?

This is the big one, and it's the thing most photo books skip entirely.

A book of images alone is pleasant for about ninety seconds. A book with a line under each moment is something you read — and reading takes longer, invites comment, and gives the person holding it something to say out loud.

Nothing in the photograph tells you that someone wouldn't come down from the tree until everyone promised ice cream. In ten years, it's the only part nobody could reconstruct.

The words don't need to be good. They need to be specific. "Lovely day at the beach" is worthless; "she filled Dad's shoes with sand and thought it was the funniest thing ever done by anyone" will still be funny in 2036.

Should you include the unflattering photos?

There's a strong pull, when making a book, to include only the good ones — everyone smiling, eyes open, nobody mid-chew.

Resist it. A book of perfect photographs is a brochure, and it reads like one. The photos people actually stop on are the ones with something slightly wrong: the tantrum, the terrible haircut, the shot where someone's clearly saying something and you can almost hear it.

Include the mess. Include the day everyone was tired. That's what makes it a record of a life rather than a highlight reel of one.

Why do books made by more than one person get opened more?

Books made by one person get looked at by one person. Books that several people contributed to get looked at by all of them — partly out of curiosity about what the others chose.

There's also a practical effect: the family photographer finally appears in the book. If you took all the pictures, you're in none of them, and a decade later your children will notice that you're strangely absent from their childhood.

Print it before it's finished. Books waiting for the perfect ending never get printed. A six-month book on the shelf is worth infinitely more than a perfect twelve-month one in a preview window. And put it somewhere reachable — not the top shelf. Photo books get opened when a child can drag one off a low shelf and demand to know who the baby is.